My repository is being aggregated: a blessing or a curse?

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

General Track Papers and Panels

Usage statistics are frequently used by repositories to justify their value to the management who decide about the funding to support the repository infrastructure. Another reason for collecting usage statistics at repositories is the increased use of webometrics in the process of assessing the impact of publications and researchers. Consequently, one of the worries repositories sometimes have about their content being aggregated is that they feel aggregations have a detrimental effect on the statistics they collect. They believe that this decrease in reported usage can negatively influence the funding provided by their own institutions. This raises the fundamental question of whether repositories should allow aggregators to harvest their metadata and content. In this paper, we discuss the benefits fof allowing content aggregations harvest repository content and investigate how to overcome the drawbacks.